Chapter 22

Chapter 22 I Return to My Muttons

AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desireto see the river again, and the steamboats, and such ofthe boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,'and started westward about the middle of April.

As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing,I took some thought as to methods of procedure.I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I shouldnot be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around,as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the customof steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confidingstranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and putthe sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts:so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it wouldbe an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names.The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother;for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy namesto remember when there is no occasion to remember them,it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind?This is a great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldomable to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed;and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscienceto further confuse me, I could never have kept the name by meat all.

We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18.

'EVENING. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness dropgradually out of it as one travels away from New York.'

I find that among my notes. It makes no differencewhich direction you take, the fact remains the same.Whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter:you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come,by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is bythat time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes.It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing;and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemenin the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the besttailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptibleeffect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakesthose people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace,and snap, and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mereclothing cannot effect.

'APRIL 19. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees-sometimesaccompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.'

It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete anduncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgottenacquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation.The goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompaniedby an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation,which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists.

'AFTERNOON. At the railway stations the loafers carry BOTHhands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore,that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here, never.This is an important fact in geography.'

If the loafers determined the character of a country, it wouldbe still more important, of course.

'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratchone shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are wanting.This has an ominous look.'

By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region.Fifty years ago, the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union.It is greatly restricted now.

Next, boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however.Later--away down the Mississippi--they became the rule.They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud;no doubt they will disappear from the river villages, also,when proper pavements come in.

We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counterof the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name,with a miserable attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused,and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspectsa respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances;then he said--

'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want.Used to clerk at the St. James, in New York.'

An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started tothe supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere.How odd and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing undermy NOM DE GUERRE and nobody suspects them; but when an honest manattempts an imposture, he is exposed at once.

One thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day,if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate:an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis.The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortabletime there. It is large, and well conducted, and its decorations donot make one cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House, in Chicago.True, the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period, and the cues andballs of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort;for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.

The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was theabsence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign,he was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces,and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it,which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowdin the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis.In those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men;given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likelyto be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now,and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time theyused to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him onthe shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these people did it.Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away inthese twenty-one years.

When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying.Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom,nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handyin an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that youmeant him. He said--

'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--drink this slush?'

'Can't you drink it?'

'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.'

Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affectedthis water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centurieswould succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent,bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acreof land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese.If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separatethe land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will findthem both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome.The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. But the nativesdo not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them.When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass,they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel.It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but onceused to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case.It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthlessfor all other purposes, except baptizing.

Next morning, we drove around town in the rain.The city seemed but little changed. It WAS greatly changed,but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in Londonand Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new;the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you takeyour hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size,since I was a resident of it, and was now become a cityof 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts,it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure thereis not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be.The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy overthe town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very muchthinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think.I heard no complaint.

However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably indwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautifuland modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them;whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks,and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an archedframe-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enoughwhen it was rarer.

There was another change--the Forest Park. This was new to me.It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent meritof having been made mainly by nature. There are other parks,and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens;for St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlierday than did the most of our cities.

The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for sixmillion dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis,this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every handinto dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowedthat opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems,of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet therewere reasons at the time to justify this course.

A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fiftyyears ago, said--'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.'Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet;but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. The 'CatholicNew Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidentlycalled upon to admire it, with its 'species of Grecian portico, surmounted bya kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmountedby sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself 'quiteunable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helpedhim out with the exclamation--'By ----, they look exactly like bed-posts!'St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now,and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost itsimportance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray,if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St. Louiswith strong confidence.

The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly Irealized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes indetail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too:changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity.

But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time,a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboatswhere I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones!This was melancholy, this was woeful. The absence of the pervadingand jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained.He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone,his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd,he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves,a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide andsoundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used tocontend!'St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants. THE RIVER ABREAST OF THE TOWNIS CROWDED WITH STEAMBOATS, LYING IN TWO OR THREE TIERS.']> Herewas desolation, indeed.

'The old, old sea, as one in tears, Comes murmuring, with foamy lips, And knocking at the vacant piers, Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.'

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done itwell and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along overour heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation.Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction,that the bridge doesn't pay. Still, it can be no sufficientcompensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid himout was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.

The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalkswere rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud.All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays,and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone;and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheapfoul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them;the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and intheir places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes,some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep.St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city;but the river-edge of it seems dead past resurrection.

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years,it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more,it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarianwho could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrastedwith what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating maybe called dead.

It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducingthe freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doingin two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing;and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight trafficby dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the riverat a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competitionwas out of the question.

Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers.This is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river betweenSt. Paul and New Orleans---of two or three close corporations wellfortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-likemanagement and system, these make a sufficiency of money outof what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry.I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materiallyby the change, but alas for the wood-yard man!

He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandisestretched from the one city to the other, along the banks,and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail;but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now,and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.Where now is the once wood-yard man?